pricingI would like to price code-reviews based on number of statements (roughly lines of code). I don’t want to count comments or white space because they help the reviewer rather than slow him down.
I want to adjust for multiple statements packed on the same line. For example, minified css and js will put thousands of statements on the same line. So really, I want to count number of statements.
To that end I would count:
Are there any concerns with this way of pricing? Am I missing anything? Is there enough of a difference for code review purposes between declarative and logical statements that I should factor that into pricing?
As a side note, I am familiar with CLOC and SLOCCount which would need additional code to do this type of count, but if you know of a better tool, a comment would be appreciated, but answers should focus on pointing out problems with this pricing structure.
I think the things you have picked up are reasonable.
I suspect you have thought of these aspects already, but you need to make it a repeatable and as automated process as possible, so I would suggest one or more "standard" code formatters. You obviously don't want an online one, but an installed offline version that caters for your languages.
I realise that these code formatters will often split lines of code over multiple lines. I would accept this as reasonable and build this into your costing-business model. The code you get will be more maintainable and the other advantage is that your clients can have a easier way to determine what they are paying for.
Then following that, you could write a PHP/Perl/Python script that will count lines of code as per the formatted lines, ignoring comments, white space etc.
I realise that I haven't focused on your exact question. but potential problem that you could have with your pricing model are:-
Overall, I think its a decent enough method, especially if you are paying for the code to be written using the same metric, then charging a margin on the code that is sold. You can potentially use fairly low level coders, depending on the complexity and scope of what you want.
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